HCP #86 - How to go sub 75, 70, 65 in HYROX, part 1

**Anthony** (0:10)
This is episode 86 of the Hybrid Coaching Podcast. In this episode, I'm gonna go over how to run sub 75, sub 70, sub 65 HYROX race. This first part of this will be just based on the personal experience and how I did, but the next time we go over this, which should be the next episode, I will dive into the strategies behind it and how to break it down based on your station time. A little bit more than I do on the back half of this episode. Additionally, I answered a couple of questions that people had about the wall balls from last episode. Let's make Hybrid Fitness work for you. How's it going today, everyone? I am back with a solo episode today. In this episode, I think I just talked about in the intro, I am going to talk about how to achieve your HYROX time goals. Because everybody has a little bit different of a time goal. So I want to discuss, you know, where you come from because your background approaching the race matters, how to approach your race based on your strengths, and then how to lean into your strengths to actually compete and achieve your goal. This is equivalent to most people that have ran a marathon or something, and like you go to your first one, you're like, oh, wow, okay, so that's what it's going to be like, and then you run your second one, you're like, I just want to beat my first one, and then you get to like your third or fourth one, you're like, all right, you know, I ran a five hour and then I ran like a 430, can I break four hours or can I break 330? And everybody has their little goals like that. There's always these time barriers. And I've noticed as a coach here that a lot of people have a time barrier of, I want to break 75 minutes.
75 and 70 seem to be like the time barriers that most women want to break, and 70 and 65 are the ones that like most men are looking to break. It doesn't mean you can't break the lower ones. It's just that, you know, usually when you're at like your third or fourth race, people are like, okay, I have a couple, a little bit of experience. I want to try to bring my time down. So I'm going to talk about that today, and I'm going to use my own experience for that. Because if you don't know, I've ran a few, and I've ran 81 minutes, 66 minutes, and 65 minutes. And I do have an eventual goal of getting a sub 63, or about 63 And I'll talk about why here in a little bit. But before we get into that, we had a couple of questions on the wall ball progression that we talked about in last week's episode. So I just want to discuss those questions we got and explain some reasoning behind them. So first off, somebody asked, did I hear you correctly? My max for thrusters should be 200 pounds if I am doing 20 wall balls, 10 percent. So yes, if you want to have the strength to be able to do basically an unbroken set, it's not a hard firm rule, but it is a general application. So usually say 10 percent and you'd probably be able to do like 100 reps, right? So if you have a 200 pound thruster or front squat or push press or all three, then yeah, more likely than not, you would be able to handle that 20 pound wall ball for 100 reps. Now, one issue there is that if you have your 20 pound wall ball and you have, say, a giant front squat, you can do like 250, but your max push press is like 175, and your max thruster is like 165 These are on pounds, by the way, not kilos. If that's the case, more likely than not, you're going to be a shoulder burnout person. So the reason you fell out wall balls is because of your shoulder burnout. You could squat that 20 pound ball all day, but you won't be able to push the ball to the target repetitively because it's just too high of a percentage. Now, that doesn't mean that you won't be able to. 15% can also be taken, which 15% is like 20 pounds is 135 pounds or 133 So like 135 thruster is also good. It's just if you can get to the minimum strength level or that of about 200 pounds, you're going to have a much easier time with the 20 pound ball. And the limiter would really be your conditioning and in no way your strength. That's just what the 10% rule kind of was. So that's what I meant by saying 10%. It's 10 to 15%, but 10% would apply really strongly to that. It doesn't mean you can't do 100 ball balls, just you're probably doing 100 unbroken a little bit with less effort and energy. If your thruster is, so that the ball is only 10% of your max thruster. All right, and then the next question I got on the wall ball progression is, sorry, I didn't understand the progression for wall balls. If I complete the 10 minute EMOM at 15 reps, what should I do the following week? A 10 minute EMOM at 15 reps plus an 8 minute EMOM at 16 reps? Thanks for the quality of the podcast. All right, so no, you don't repeat. So what you do is you do say, I'll just, somebody that has never done it before, and but they have the required strength and they're able to do this. So I use a 30 pound ball as a male, and usually I would assign a 20 pound ball to female. So 30 pound, 20 pound, same 10 foot, 9 foot targets. To start this out, if somebody goes 10 minute EMOM, 15 reps of 30, 20 pounds, 10, 9 feet, then if they complete that and they go unbroken, and I always have this rule of twice unbroken. So if you complete that and you go unbroken, the next week you would do the same thing, a 10 minute EMOM of 15 reps. If you complete it a second time, that's one week, two weeks unbroken, then the following week, the next thing you would do is an eight minute EMOM of 16 reps, right? Plus one reps, minus two minutes. So the total reps comes down, but it's more reps density. Then if you complete that in week three and four, both unbroken, then in week five, you would do a seven minute EMOM of 17 reps. If you complete that in week five and six unbroken, you would do a six minute EMOM of 18 reps. So six minute EMOM of 18 reps in weeks seven and eight. Then if you're completely unbroken with that, you would go the hard one, five minute EMOM of 20 reps. If you can complete that unbroken or 20 reps every minute for five minutes, it's just five minutes long in weeks nine and 10, then the final, I mean, it can keep going, but you do it with a regular wall ball and then you do it with the heavy wall ball. So I just described it with the heavy wall ball. If you do it week 11, so you've done all those previous ones unbroken. Week 11, the one time you would do it, you could do every 90 seconds of 25 reps. So that's six minutes long, four sets every 90 seconds, 25 reps of wall ball.